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For Simmons, the games of childhood serve primarily as thinly veiled training for an adulthood predicated on conspicuous consumption. Through the hierarchy of gateway drugs, her interpretation of “Candyland” is similar to the original game where fruit is at the bottom and chocolate is at the top. However, she adjusts the board through a more provocative adult lens, portraying innocent and often literally saccharine sweet features of the board as explicit and highly sinister characters, exploring the conflation and confusion of two languages: the innocent simplicity of a child’s, and the overwrought complexity expressed by mass media. Parallels between childhood games and adult vices are overt. Toss the dice and roll a joint, jump ahead three to the X-Rated Sugar Valley and trade in Mr. Mint for Mr. Menthe, Lord Licorice for Lord Liquor and Queen Frostine for Blow Queen. ‘Sweet Escape’ portrays the issues that plague our culture of consumption and, ironically, sugarcoats nothing. Simmons suggests that adulthood is not a banishment from the Eden of childhood, but, rather, that there is no Eden from which to be banished. Children grow up too fast; adults never grow up at all.